Summer Workshop on Ancient Greek Graffiti

The Ancient Graffiti Project invites applications for a week-long workshop on the Greek graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum, to take place August 2-7, 2015, hosted at the Center for Hellenic Studies, in Washington DC.

The Ancient Graffiti Project aims to make the first-century AD handwritten inscriptions from ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum accessible to a wide audience, both for scholarly research and for public interest. We held our first field season last summer in Herculaneum. This summer we will expand the project by focusing on processing and digitizing the Greek graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The workshop will provide epigraphic and digital training so that participants can study and analyze ancient Greek graffiti while contributing to multiple digital humanities initiatives including the Epigraphic Database Roma and EAGLE, the Europeana Network of Greek and Latin Epigraphy.

Participants will have the possibility to continue working with the project through the next academic year and/or to join the 2016 field season in Italy. Housing and some meals will be provided through generous support of the Center for Hellenic Studies; participants will be responsible for their own travel. We also have available a few spots for virtual participation in the workshop via live video-streaming.

If you are interested in attending the workshop this summer, in person or virtually, click here to apply. Questions? Write Professor Holly Sypniewski, Assistant Director for Digitization, at sypnih-at-millsaps.edu for more information.

Dec. 15, 2014:
Our first field season was held in Herculaneum during summer 2014. As of December 15, 2014, we have digitized and made available through the Epigraphic Database Roma sixty graffiti that we documented there.

During fall 2014, we have also been creating a freely available, open-source map of Herculaneum through OpenStreetMap. We are happy to announce that map is now complete. We aim to have it clickable, fully functional, and linked to the digitized graffiti by the end of next summer.

We are currently working on processing additional graffiti from Herculaneum, texts and incised drawings, as well as graffiti from Pompeii, Insulae I.6 and I.7.